[Beowulf] automount on high ports

[Tim Cutts]

On 4 Jul 2008, at 3:41 pm, Joe Landman wrote:

> Carsten Aulbert wrote:
>
>> easy with dsh and fai softupdate :)
>
> trivial with pdsh
>
> 	pdsh apt-get install package

Actually, that one could get you in a mess if the package is going to  
to ask questions.  You might want to shut apt-get up.  I actually use  
a small wrapper script for apt-get -- actually, I use aptitude these  
days, because its dependency handling is better -- which we call niagi:

#!/bin/sh
#
# niagi - noninteractive aptitude install
#

DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive \
    /usr/bin/aptitude -R -y \
         -o Dpkg::Options::="--force-confdef" \
         -o Dpkg::Options::="--force-confold" \
       install "$@"

This forces aptitude not to ask you what to do with the configuration  
files, if they've been locally modified, but also forces it to be  
conservative, always use your existing configuration file, if it's  
already present.  Otherwise it configures the package defaults.   
Combine this little script with cfengine, dsh or whatever, and you  
have a winner.

You can even use it to remove things, because aptitude install accepts  
suffixes to tell it to do other things.  For example, say you wanted  
to replaced lprng with cups, you can do that in one fell swoop with:

aptitude install lprng- cupsys

(this is another reason I switched from apt-get to aptitude, although  
I'd caution against using aptitude like this in sarge - the version in  
etch and later is fine, but the old sarge one can bite occasionally)

Tim


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